The results show that, when compared with the general female population, feminists are much less likely to be religious, but a little more likely to be interested in alternative or non-institutional kinds of spirituality.

That’s a relief, isn’t it? Much less likely to be religious but oh whew, a little more likely to be “spiritual.” At least they’re not all hopelessly atheistic and bad.

[Pat] Robertson was worried that feminism was challenging traditional Christian values – at least, values he considered Christian. Many liberals and feminists, concerned about the rise of fundamentalism and its erosion of women’s rights, conclude similarly that feminism and religion have little in common. As Cath Elliott put it:

Whether it’s one of the world’s major faiths or an off-the-wall cult, religion means one thing and one thing only for those women unfortunate enough to get caught up in it: oppression. It’s the patriarchy made manifest, male-dominated, set up by men to protect and perpetuate their power.

Well said. At least I think so, but Aune doesn’t.

Sidestepping the arguments about whether or not religion is irredeemably oppressive to women (Christina Odone has refuted Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s recent claim that it is), it’s important to ask why feminists think like this.

Yes but before we do that, let’s pause over that claim about Odone. Did she refute our claim (we didn’t make that claim, in fact, but it’s perhaps close enough)? No; she disagreed with some of it, but that’s not refuting it. Besides, Odone of course was reviewing our book from the point of view of a dogmatic Catholic, which is no doubt why the Observer wanted her to be the one to review it. She was never going to agree with most of it, was she.

Second, feminism’s intellectual public voice has largely been a secular one. As the philosopher Rosi Braidotti has argued, European feminists are heirs to the Enlightenment rationalistic critique of religion, and socialist feminism (with its dismissal of religion) was one of the major strands of British feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Even today, feminist academics tend to dismiss religion as unimportant and not worth of studying. It is likely that this secularism has influenced today’s feminists, perhaps without them noticing. (Whether this secularism has much to offer the millions of women who are, by socialisation or choice, religious, is a prescient issue that is being raised especially by postcolonial critics.)

Yes, postcolonial critics, who see (or claim to see) universal rights and egalitarianism as a narsty colonialist plot. I’ll stick with the Enlightenment “rationalistic” critique of religion.

30 Responses to “Do women hate god?”

How surprising. “God loves you, and by the way he thinks you’re an inferior creature who should always do whatever I say.” What’s not to like?

Regarding “refute” — I think British usage tends to lean a little more toward “object to” or “criticize” rather than “prove to be false.” I first noticed this tendency some years ago, but it never fails to annoy me. There is a perfectly good word “rebut” just laying there unnoticed.

What the hell is the thesis? Did anyone catch that? Is it that, while celebrating their liberation from religion, feminists should beware abandoning religious women? Is that it? An opaque call for accommodation?

We need to know far more than a survey can tell us about how religious attitudes are formed to tell whether these hypotheses are accurate.

What hypotheses? You mean that first, second and third shit? And what is an accurate hypothesis.

By the way, if you skipped this link, you missed the day’s best entertainment.

The main argument is that the postsecular turn challenges European feminism because it makes manifest the notion that agency, or political subjectivity, can be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality. This statement also implies that political agency need not be critical in the negative sense of oppositional and thus may not be aimed solely or primarily at the production of counter-subjectivities.

This one sentence really bugs me:<blockquote>Even today, feminist academics tend to dismiss religion as unimportant and not worth of studying.</blockquote>

Where did this come from? How can anybody think that religion is unimportant? Religion has tremendous effects on human behavior, and oppression of women is among the more significant of those effects. I’m not that well-read on feminism, but I would be highly <i>highly</i> surprised if no feminists have found religion worth studying, or if even a majority of feminists failed to think it was an important topic (important enough to support their colleagues studying it, even if they don’t themselves).

My suspicion here is that by “important” Kristin actually means “good”, which is absolutely not the same thing.

“Refutation” is one of these alarm words. When I see it written, it almost always means the author wants to claim victory without having done the argumentative work to achieve it. It’s the Chemical Ali of rhetoric.

The linked article fell a long way short of refutation. I couldn’t even find many coherent arguments in there. My favourite: Karen Armstrong cannot be “an inveterate Muslim apologist” because of “the restraint that characterises her work on world religions.”

There are, as others have pointed out, plenty of appropriate words to use, such “disagreed with”, “rejected”, “spoke against”, etc. “Rebut”, though, IMHO belongs with “refute” as a word that implies a successful counter-argument (except in legal proceedings, where rebuttals can fail dismally).

…in our project, only one in 10 identified with a major world religion (mostly Christianity). Just over half the feminists said they were either atheist or had no religion. One in six was agnostic. One in 12 considered themselves spiritual but not conventionally religious and the rest answered in other ways (there were a couple of pagan atheists and Buddhist Christians, for instance).

It seems, then, that feminism does inspire women to reject religion.

She interviewed a thousand women but she’s doesn’t seem clued-up on how to make sense of their answers. It’s far more likely to suggest that irreligious women are open to feminism. It’s a bit like interviewing members the pro-life movement, finding most of ’em are Christians and concluding that protesting on behalf of foetus’s makes one more accepting of religious doctrine.

It is likely that this secularism has influenced today’s feminists, perhaps without them noticing.

Or perhaps, gee I dunno, many feminists have actually thought about it and come to the conclusion all by themselves that there is probably no god? Or that religious institutions probably shouldn’t have political power? Given that critical thinking skills and a tendency to question the status quo are features of both rejecting patriarchy and rejecting religion / religious authority?

Even today, feminist academics tend to dismiss religion as unimportant and not worth of studying.

Not true in my experience. I went to talk to the head of the Gender Studies department of my local uni last year, who told me that they do study religion, and in fact only from the point of view of ‘changing it from the inside’. She made it quite clear that criticising religion’s treatment of women per se was not acceptable, and rolled her eyes at my mention of OB’s work. Anecdotal, but still.

Whether this secularism has much to offer the millions of women who are, by socialisation or choice, religious, is a prescient issue…

Why would secularism not have anything to offer religious women? Secularism isn’t about banning religion or discriminating against religious women, or stopping them from practising. It’s not even about being an atheist. If you’re a secularist you simply want to keep religion out of politics and public life. It’s an insidious implication that ‘secularism’ and/or atheism is harmful to religious women. It simply isn’t.

Strange to think that women would replace traditional religion with other types of woo. Haven’t they learned about the sheer oppressiveness of irrational types of thinking? I also find it a bit disturbing that feminists tend (if this survey is anything to go by) to be sexually alternative and/or ambiguous, which suggests that the movement for women’s liberation is still a radical movement and has failed to become mainstream. That’s not good news at all, given the reassertion of the churches and the introduction of a repressive Islam at the heart of Western democracies. Women who benefit from the feminist movement but do not support it are a danger to women’s freedoms. It also seems to indicate that, even though many women have left religion behind, their self-conception is still largely dependent on religious stereotypes. Think women like Christine Ondone or Ann Widdecombe in this connexion, free, assertive, opinionated, yet at the same time submissive in the religious sphere. As to the question — Do women hate god? — they sure as hell ought to, and substituting female spirituality won’t really solve the problem, for minority spiritualities like this will be simply swept away if there is a resurgence of traditional religion.

The woo thing: I don’t get it either. But in my experience feminist blogs/threads tend to have a large proportion of commenters claiming there to be ‘other ways of knowing’ and other such nebulous nonsense. I think at least part of it is a view of science/skepticism as inherently patriarchy-serving. You can probably blame post-modernism for this.

I raised an eyebrow at the large proportion of non-heterosexual survey respondents too. But I wonder – because Aune didn’t go into detail – how many of those respondents ticked ‘bisexual’. Feminists may be more open to the idea of sleeping / going out with with another woman even though they are mainly straight. But I don’t doubt that feminism is still not mainstream enough.

The data could be influenced by how they went about getting their subjects of course. I participated in the survey because it was advertised on The F Word, but if they also advertised the survey on LGBTQI sites, etc, then that might explain the results seen for sexuality.

Have you checked the actual numbers in the link? Almost 70% of feminists list atheist, agnostic or “none” as their religious affiliation (and specifically Humanist feminists aren’t in that category). That “greater” amount of feminists who believe in spiritualism? It’s seven percent. The percentage of women who practice “Major World Religions”? Ten percent or so.

The only responsible take-away from this study is “Feminists Predominantly Non-Religious.”

Yes but before we do that, let’s pause over that claim about Odone. Did she refute our claim (we didn’t make that claim, in fact, but it’s perhaps close enough)? No; she disagreed with some of it, but that’s not refuting it. Besides, Odone of course was reviewing our book from the point of view of a dogmatic Catholic, which is no doubt why the Observer wanted her to be the one to review it. She was never going to agree with most of it, was she.

I recall that review. If I remember correctly it was the first time I ever emailed you.

The biggest problem with the review is that Odone was suffering the delusion that the god Benson and Stangroom were discussing was real, rather than simply being what people do in his name.

I only skimmed the the report linked as “results” thing, and might have missed something, but did anybody see any controlling for education or socioeconomic status?

Education and irreligiosity are generally positively correlated. So are education and feminism. My guess would be that those things are true in Britain. I’d also guess that both are positively correlated with socioeconomic status.

90 percent of their sample is college-educated, unlike the majority of Britons (IIRC).

Is that all there is to it, such that most of the other correlations are would disappear or mostly disappear if you controlled for that?

If its mostly education or SES as the common factor, it’s still interesting to speculate how the causality works. How much does education cause atheism and feminism, how much does being smart or just curious lead to all three, etc.?

I doubt that can explain the high non-heterosexuality, though. There’s probably something special there. God does hate non-heterosexuals.

I’ll add a skeptical voice. I don’t see a detailed methodology for the survey — but it appears this was a self-selected group of women who were targeted through announcements/ads in online gathering places not just for feminists, but also in sites specifically for lesbian/bisexual women. You’ve got quite a selection bias working there. Heck, there doesn’t even appear to be a method to validate that the women surveyed were actually … well … women.

I don’t think these results can be extrapolated out to the population at large. Nor even the larger population of feminists.

Gotta do better with the methodology, I think. As it is, I think it merely demonstrates some demographic information about the denizens of a few web sites that are designed to attract exactly the type of audience that the survey demonstrates it does attract. Sort of like surveying the Daily Kos web site and discovering that it’s populated mainly by US Democrats.

I think if you can qualify a randomly selected audience of women who identify themselves as feminists and compare them to a randomly selected audience of women who do not, you will come up with some very interesting differences. And perhaps many more similarities than is apparent here.

it appears this was a self-selected group of women who were targeted through announcements/ads in online gathering places not just for feminists, but also in sites specifically for lesbian/bisexual women. You’ve got quite a selection bias working there. Heck

This reminds me that I’d noticed, but the forgot, that they said all of the respondents were members of feminist organizations created in the 21st century. Another weird criterion, and likely related to the other oddities. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the feminist organizations created in the 21st century were small campus groups. A lot of student organizations are short-lived, because whoever is the backbone of the group graduates. Often you get some other motivate person to start a similar group a few years later, and it too dies when the founder(s) leave.